Does your mortgage protection get more expensive the longer you have it?

The short answer is no, for the reason you'd expect

Most mortgage protection sold in Ireland is decreasing-term cover with a guaranteed premium. At the outset, the insurer calculates a fixed monthly amount for the whole term, based on your age, health and smoking status on that one day. That number is locked in. It doesn't rise as you get older within the term, and — for standard cover — it isn't reviewed or increased later because of your claims history, your health, or the insurer's own costs. The cover itself falls every year in line with your mortgage balance; the price you pay for it does not.

That's worth being precise about, because there is one genuine exception. If you chose an indexed policy — where cover and premium rise each year in line with inflation — that increase is real, but it's one you opted into at the start, not one applied to you later. Worth checking your own schedule to confirm whether indexation was selected; if it wasn't, your premium simply doesn't move.

Why this is different from car or home insurance

It's easy to assume mortgage protection works the same way as other insurance you hold, but the two are priced on completely different timelines. Car and home insurance are written and repriced every single year — a new quote, a new premium, every twelve months, whether or not anything about you has actually changed. Mortgage protection is priced once, at the very start, for the entire term of the policy: one quote covering thirty years, rather than thirty separate ones.

That's the whole difference, and it's a simple one. An annual policy gets looked at again every year by definition. A mortgage protection premium doesn't, because there's no annual renewal point for it to be looked at again — the price was set once, on day one, for the life of the term. The trade-off is exactly what you'd expect: certainty for the whole term, in exchange for no built-in moment that ever prompts you to check whether it's still good value.

But a fixed price isn't the same as a competitive one

Here's the part that's easy to miss. Because your premium was fixed on day one, it reflects the market, the underwriting practice and your own circumstances as they stood on that one day — possibly a decade or two ago. It tells you nothing about what the market looks like today. If someone with a broadly similar profile applied today, they might be quoted more than you're paying. They might be quoted less. Pricing, underwriting appetite and product design all move over time, in both directions, and your own premium — precisely because it's guaranteed — will never reflect any of it.

The scale of that gap can be real. A mystery-shop exercise by Royal London Ireland found that buying identical mortgage protection cover through a broker was, on average, 27.5% cheaper than buying the same cover through a mainstream bank in the scenarios tested. That's a difference driven by channel, not by loyalty — but it illustrates how much variation can exist for cover that looks identical on paper.

How to actually find out

1. Ask for a fresh comparison on the same basis — same cover, same term — using the mylife chat, which can run it in a few minutes, or by talking it through with one of our team. 2. Note your age, cover amount and remaining term as they stand today, so the comparison is based on your real numbers. 3. Check that the cover amount itself is still right. If you've made overpayments, or capitalised any missed payments, at any point during the mortgage, the amount you're insured for may no longer match what you actually owe. 4. Ask whether the policy schedule itself still matches your balance. Standard decreasing-term cover is fixed to a 6% notional rate at outset rather than your actual mortgage rate, and mylife.ie research (*The Decreasing-Term Anachronism*, MWP-2026-03) found this can leave borrowers overinsured by €14,000 or more mid-term — worth a check if you're well into your term or hold a larger mortgage.

One rule worth keeping in mind

Never cancel an existing policy before its replacement is fully accepted and in force. A guaranteed premium you already hold is a real asset — there's no reason to give it up on the strength of a quote that hasn't actually completed yet.

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